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Announcing Heroku Free SSL Beta and Flexible Dyno Hours

blog.heroku.com

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Re: Announcing Heroku Free SSL Beta and Flexible Dyno Hours

#11

Post by simonw »

sync wrote: post #2

> Starting June 1st, when you sign up for a Heroku account you will immediately get 550 free dyno hours. In addition, we add another 450 dyno hours for a total of 1,000 free dyno hours if you verify your identity by providing us with a valid credit card. Any thoughts on what Heroku gets out of identity verification / credit card info?

Heroku's free offering is a massive target for abuse - spammers/scammers abusing it to host e.g. phishing sites, but also regular developers who don't want to pay for the service and so sign up for multiple accounts just so they can run more than their usual allotment of free dynos.

Having the credit card verified and on file also greatly reduces the barrier to starting to pay for something - in my experience it's pretty common with a Heroku free account to run into something where you're just over a limit, and you end up saying "fine, I'll start paying $7/month for this right now so I can move on with my life".

Re: Announcing Heroku Free SSL Beta and Flexible Dyno Hours

#12

Post by bgentry »

wheaties wrote: post #7

Finally, charging $20 for SSL was just highway robbery. Pure and unadulterated money grab.

Actually they were just passing on the underlying cost of the AWS ELB to you. The previous setup worked by provisioning a dedicated ELB for each app. ELBs cost $18/mo plus bandwidth charges.

Expensive? For low value apps, yes. But far from a "pure and unadulterated money grab."

Re: Announcing Heroku Free SSL Beta and Flexible Dyno Hours

#13

Post by tedmiston »

sync wrote: post #2

> Starting June 1st, when you sign up for a Heroku account you will immediately get 550 free dyno hours. In addition, we add another 450 dyno hours for a total of 1,000 free dyno hours if you verify your identity by providing us with a valid credit card. Any thoughts on what Heroku gets out of identity verification / credit card info?

Preventing abuse is a big problem for every PaaS with a free plan.

It's probably a step toward making all free accounts require identity verification.

Re: Announcing Heroku Free SSL Beta and Flexible Dyno Hours

#16

Post by drdaeman »

ropiku wrote: post #10
drdaeman wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having different CCs is harder than just multiple emails. Don't many banks issue virtual debit cards at negligible or even at no cost?

They do but don't they have the same address & name ? At least it confirms identity.

I'm not sure a typical bank card detail form include an address. Usually it's card number, expiry date, CVV/CSC and (optional, as some cards don't have it!) cardholder's name. Not sure about Heroku and too lazy to remember a password and log in there to check right now.

Heroku may have address fields for invoices and stuff, but I really doubt they can validate it (except for country/state) with bank, as addresses are real mess. At the very least, not automatically. So, this probably won't work for abuse prevention.

Re: Announcing Heroku Free SSL Beta and Flexible Dyno Hours

#17

Post by koolba »

(emphasis mine)

> We also help you keep an eye on your consumption by sending an email notification if you consume more than 80% of the free hours in a month. Should you reach 100%, we will notify again and all free dynos will stop running until the end of the month. At the beginning of the new month, your free dyno hours are replenished and we spin the dynos back up. You can avoid running out of free dyno hours by upgrading your most successful apps to Hobby dynos.

I wonder what the thundering herd[1] effect of this on AWS would be at month start.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundering_herd_problem

Re: Announcing Heroku Free SSL Beta and Flexible Dyno Hours

#18

Post by MichaelBurge »

koolba wrote: post #17

(emphasis mine) > We also help you keep an eye on your consumption by sending an email notification if you consume more than 80% of the free hours in a month. Should you reach 100%, we will notify again and all free dynos will stop running until the end of the month. At the beginning of the new month, your free dyno hours are replenished and we spin the dynos back up. You can avoid running out of free dyno hours by u…

My guess is that if this mattered the spot instances would be cheaper at the end of the month compared to the start. Not just from Heroku, but every business that has some monthly processing that needs to be renewed at the start of the month.

Re: Announcing Heroku Free SSL Beta and Flexible Dyno Hours

#20

Post by simonw »

drdaeman wrote: post #6
ropiku wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's mainly to prevent spam/multiple account creation. Having different CCs is harder than just multiple emails. It also makes it easy to upsell you to paid plans.

> Having different CCs is harder than just multiple emails. Don't many banks issue virtual debit cards at negligible or even at no cost?

Even with virtual debit cards, this kind of data is still extremely useful from a fraud prevention point of view. Maybe you can spot a pattern that signups on one particular brand of virtual debit card from one particular IP range are most likely to be abusive. With fraud prevention, anything additional that can be used as a signal is useful.
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